A Visit to the Vet

Well, it finally got to that point...

Pradoo (pronounced "prado", originally "Prada", remember?), is now officially Pradxx (also pronounced "prado")! What that means is that he won't be bothering his mother in the future, since they both live with us along with our two remaining cats from France, David (8) and Delta (10). She is an older lady - the vet said about 10 years old - and Prado is probably her last baby. Prado is really a very sweet young guy. He goes with us, Blondie and me, every morning for our 1'600m (1 mile) walk. When the weather is rotten - yes, that happens even in bella Italia - he's not unhappy to be picked up and carried, at least part of the way. He also baits our only neighbor's little dog: he waits until she comes running out, and then makes an arch with his back and hisses and the dog turns tail and runs back to the protection of her house!

I guess that's all for now, so

Ciao!

Craig

Computer Nightmares - AKA "Bye-bye MS!"

Hi there!

I made the mistake of thinking that the pc that we use in the shop in Marsciano was too small and too slow for what we need it to do (it really was, and only partly because we loaded it up with lots of other garbage). So (natural sequence of events) I bought new ones (1 for the shop and 1 for the B&B). First priority for getting them functional was the shop because we're coming into the busy season (Christmas etc.).

I don't know if you've noticed, but these days, it's almost impossible to buy a computer any way but with the operating system pre-installed. And that means MS Vista(R). Which means that your old office equipment won't have drivers for it, the expensive office software you now have probably will not function any more, and even Norton Ghost (now Symantec Ghost Suite) won't function so you can make a clean transfer, unless you have one of the expensive versions of Vista (the "home" Vista packages don't work here either). Also, most likely some of the new devices in the PC also will not function without Vista installed. In other words, you're locked into the Vista, like it or not.

I've spent the past week (7 days, not 5, averaging between 6 and 10 hours per day) trying to get the new machine to the point where my wife can use it without me standing at her side the full time she's on the machine. Two things happened during this week that Microsoft will be unhappy about if they ever happen to read this:

1. I erased the MS Works (R) and MS Office 2007 Home and Student edition 90 day trial software that was pre-installed on the machine - on purpose.
2. I installed an open-source office package (Star Office) that looks more like the software my wife is familiar with than the Office 2007 applications ever will!
   

The one thing I was not able to do was to get the Outlook 2000 e-mails into any new mail-server program (Outlook does not even exist in MS Office 2007 H&S edition). If someone has a solution here, I'm interested!

The end result is that MS lost not only the short term (relatively low price) sale of a new Office installation, they also managed to destroy my 20-year affection for MS products!

Good work for one week guys!

Ciao for now...

Craig

P.S. I also got a new 22-inch LCD for displaying product pictures for the shop when not in use for other things (screen-saver). It's terrrriffic !!!